Ontology Changes Research Articles

Fields of Interdisciplinarity

This paper provides an empirical account of the problem of interdisciplinarity in the field sciences, considering it as a driver of ontological change. Our case study is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project in environmental science. Its objective is to trace the long-term histories of European old-growth forests. To account for the mechanisms involved when researchers seek to do interdisciplinary science in the field, we describe 1/ four research practices that take advantage of the spatial order of the study site in order to make forests temporal processes knowable, thereby producing a field site crisscrossed by multiple spatiotemporal orders; 2/ those practices geared towards articulating these spatiotemporal orders and the limits faced by the consortium towards their complete integration; 3/ how such articulation transforms the conception of old-growth forests as spaces shaped by historical processes integrating human activities and valued ecological processes. We argue that interdisciplinary research practice in environmental field sciences does not lead to a synthesis of pre-existing domains of knowledge production. Rather, it does tend to transform both the object of study and the disciplines involved. The field, as both an object of study and a research place, becomes a broker toward ontological changes.

Navigating change: an exploration of socio-epistemic process of extending Wikidata ontology with new properties

PurposeThe paper addresses the issue of change in Wikidata ontology by exposing the role of the socio-epistemic processes that take place inside the infrastructure. The subject of the study was the process of extending the Wikidata ontology with a new property as an example of the interplay between the social and technical components of the Wikidata infrastructure.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, an interpretative approach to the evolution of the Wikidata ontology was used. The interpretation framework was a process-centric approach to changes in the Wikidata ontology. The extension of the Wikidata ontology with a new property was considered a socio-epistemic process where multiple agents interact for epistemic purposes. The decomposition of this process into three stages (initiation, knowledge work and closure) allowed us to reveal the role of the institutional structure of Wikidata in the evolution of its ontology.FindingsThis study has shown that the modification of the Wikidata ontology is an institutionalized process where community-accepted regulations and practices must be applied. These regulations come from the institutional structure of the Wikidata community, which sets the normative patterns for both the process and social roles and responsibilities of the involved agents.Originality/valueThe results of this study enhance our understanding of the evolution of the collaboratively developed Wikidata ontology by exposing the role of socio-epistemic processes, division of labor and normative patterns.

Political action in planetary times: Extinction activism, Anthropocene ontopolitics, indigenous complexities

This paper brings the narratives of the environmental activist groups Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Fridays for Future into conversation with Critical Anthropocene Theory and Indigenous environmentalism to interrogate pathways for and limits of environmental political action under planetary conditions marked by nonhuman shaping power. Critical Anthropocene Theory, the paper argues, can problematise the simplistic positivism and managerialism of the new ‘extinction activism’. However, the conversation with Indigenous environmental practices, which flexibly manage tensions within human-nonhuman relations and centre radical social impact, reveals the political limitations of both extinction activism and critical Anthropocene thinking. The paper distinguishes the logic of fast change within existing socio-political parameters, which drives extinction activism, from Critical Anthropocene Theory's focus on ontological change as a precondition for a non-exploitative environmental politics, which deprioritises activist practice. Different from both, the paper argues that Indigenous environmental activism is marked by a yet different pragmatic approach, where both modern and non-modern political means are mobilised towards radical change. Indigenous environmentalism is marked by the dynamic co-evolution of cosmology and politics and moves flexibly between modern/nonmodern boundaries, highlighting new pathways for political action in the relational Anthropocene.

한국 신화에 나타난 죽음 사건과 그 의미

In Greek mythology, the human world and the afterlife are strictly separated. On the other hand, in Korean mythology, gods appear between this world and the afterlife. Representative entities include Bari from 〈Princess Bari〉 and Ganglim from 〈Chasabonpuri〉. Previous studies mainly looked at the mythological meanings and perspectives on the underworld/death shown in these people’s underworld adventures and travels.
 On the other hand, this study attempted to examine the view of death in Korean mythology through the occurrence of various death incidents in mythological texts and the relationship between death incidents, that is, the intersection of human death and divine death that seeks to resolve it. Human death in the mythical world is God’s punishment for humans and a gateway to growth. On the other hand, divine death is a way to examine the cause of human death and solve death as a problem, and is an opportunity for ontological change to become a god.
 Specifically, the shamanic myths 〈Chasabonpuri〉 and 〈Princess Bari〉 give the concept of ‘justice’ to the continuity of life and death or the principle by which the events of life and death are composed. During human life, one must act righteously based on the standards of right and wrong, and if one is greedy, he or she will be punished by death.
 In this process, we can see that life and death are causal and cyclical, and are linked to concerns about how humans should live. The aspects of death that appear in the shamanic myths 〈Princess Bari〉 and 〈Chasabonpuri〉, such as violent death, punitive death, and instrumental death, are a world of shamanic mythology that unravels the origin of justice through the occurrence of various death incidents and their relationships. It tells you that you are paying.

Effects of Halloysite Nanotubes and Multi-walled Carbon Nanotubes on Kruppel-like Factor 15-Mediated Downstream Events in Mouse Hearts After Intravenous Injection.

Halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) are nanomaterials (NMs) derived from natural clays and have been considered as biocompatible NMs for biomedical uses. However, the cardiovascular toxicity of HNTs has not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we compared the cardiotoxicity of HNTs and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), focusing on the changes in Kruppel-like factor (KLF)-mediated signaling pathways. Mice were intravenously injected with 50µg NMs, once a day, for 5 days, and then mouse hearts were removed for experiments. While HNTs or MWCNTs did not induce obvious pathological changes, RNA-sequencing data suggested the alterations of KLF gene expression. We further confirmed an increase of Klf15 positive cells, accompanied by changes in Klf15-related gene ontology (GO) terms. We noticed that most of the changed GO terms are related with the regulation of gene expression, and we confirmed that the NMs increased myoneurin (Mynn) but decreased snail family transcriptional repressor 1 (Snai1), two transcription factors (TFs) related with Klf15. Besides, the changed GO terms also include metal ion binding and positive regulation of glucose import, and we verified an increase of phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase 1 (Pck1) and insulin receptor (Insr). However, HNTs and MWCNTs only showed minimal impact on cell death signaling pathways, and no increase in apoptotic sites was observed after NM treatment. We concluded that intravenous administration of HNTs and MWCNTs activated a protective TF, namely Klf15 in mouse aortas, to alter gene expression and signaling pathways related with metal ion binding and glucose import.

The ontology of financial markets and the policy paradigm of financial regulation

ABSTRACT This study aims to discern the ontological assumptions of the financial regulatory paradigm to clarify the meaning of a paradigm shift and the significance of the macroprudential turn in global financial regulation. An ontological understanding of financial markets is a key requirement to understand the hard core assumptions of the financial regulatory paradigm because the conflation of distinct ontologies makes it impossible to maintain the internal coherence of the financial regulatory paradigm. In terms of the ontological assumptions of the financial regulatory paradigm, the macroprudential turn in global financial regulations after the 2008 financial crisis fell short of leading to a paradigm shift in global financial regulation since it brought about an explanatory rather than ontological change. Macroprudential ideas rejected the explanatory reductionism of existing microprudential regulation without abandoning its ontological individualism.

Analysis and implementation of the DynDiff tool when comparing versions of ontology

BackgroundOntologies play a key role in the management of medical knowledge because they have the properties to support a wide range of knowledge-intensive tasks. The dynamic nature of knowledge requires frequent changes to the ontologies to keep them up-to-date. The challenge is to understand and manage these changes and their impact on depending systems well in order to handle the growing volume of data annotated with ontologies and the limited documentation describing the changes.MethodsWe present a method to detect and characterize the changes occurring between different versions of an ontology together with an ontology of changes entitled DynDiffOnto, designed according to Semantic Web best practices and FAIR principles. We further describe the implementation of the method and the evaluation of the tool with different ontologies from the biomedical domain (i.e. ICD9-CM, MeSH, NCIt, SNOMEDCT, GO, IOBC and CIDO), showing its performance in terms of time execution and capacity to classify ontological changes, compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.ResultsThe experiments show a top-level performance of DynDiff for large ontologies and a good performance for smaller ones, with respect to execution time and capability to identify complex changes. In this paper, we further highlight the impact of ontology matchers on the diff computation and the possibility to parameterize the matcher in DynDiff, enabling the possibility of benefits from state-of-the-art matchers.ConclusionDynDiff is an efficient tool to compute differences between ontology versions and classify these differences according to DynDiffOnto concepts. This work also contributes to a better understanding of ontological changes through DynDiffOnto, which was designed to express the semantics of the changes between versions of an ontology and can be used to document the evolution of an ontology.

Evaluation of Epistemic Beliefs Self-Report Questionnaires in the Czech Middle School History Classroom

Epistemic beliefs are gaining increasing importance in social science education in Czechia. Recent literature has demonstrated findings linking epistemic beliefs with various academic skills, including achievement and reading comprehension. The present study aims to explore the epistemic beliefs of adolescents specific to the domain of history. The study reviews research literature on ontological changes in students’ epistemic beliefs and their reasoning within the domain of history since the 1950s, with a particular focus on various models and measurement. The empirical part of the study investigates adapted self-report questionnaires on the epistemic beliefs of adolescents in Czech history classes in the upper grades of middle school. In the first step, the selected questionnaires were back-translated and refined by iterative sets of cognitive interviews. The finalised sets of items were administered in seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade classes (N = 303) in May and June 2021. The confirmatory factor analysis and follow-up correlational analysis demonstrated various degrees of support for the dimensions of the Epistemic and Ontological Cognition Questionnaire, for the dimension of Value of Integration Information, and for the dimension of Historical Methodology in Generating Historical Knowledge. Reading comprehension correlated positively with epistemic belief dimensions related to epistemic criteria of justification by multiple sources, the value of integration information, and historical methodology. Academic achievement in the form of the end-of-grade marks obtained in the subjects of history and Czech language did not show a consistent relationship with the epistemic beliefs. The potential practical and research uses of the self-report questionnaires that were investigated in regular classroom instructions are discussed. The presented study aimed to explore the domain of history that witnessed ontological changes in students’ reasoning since the 50’s (Committee on the Study of History, 1969), that gave rise to more systematic empirical studies on epistemology about history knowledge. In the 21st century, Maggioni and her colleagues (2004, 2009) constructed their self-reported questionnaire on epistemic stances on history knowledge. Ever since, following researchers further modified, advanced, and developed new measurement tools to identify student epistemic beliefs in history. Ontological theories (Kuhn et al., 2000) posited the epistemic development in college population, however, the new evidence demonstrated rudiments of epistemic reasoning in even younger population and presented its nonlinear growth (VanSledright & Reddy, 2014) contingent upon the characteristics of the learning domains (ill-structured x well-structured; Frederiksen, 1984). Since history can be viewed as an ill-structured domain, there is more room for learners to express and exchange their higher levels of epistemic beliefs compared to domains that belong among hard sciences (Barzilai & Weinstock, 2015; Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002). Therefore, history classrooms present an excellent opportunity for investigating epistemological stances of students in lower secondary education. The current study investigated the potential of epistemic beliefs measurement among the Czech history classrooms. The researchers selected assessment self-report questionnaires in the sample of students from western countries ranging from middle schools to college in the history domain (Greene et al., 2010; Stoel et al., 2017; Wiley et al., 2020). In the first step, the inspected measures were back-translated (Klassen et al., 2009) and refined by iterative sets of cognitive interviews 9/2020-5/2021 (Karabenick et al., 2007). The finalized sets of items were administered in the 7th, 8th, and 9th grade classrooms (N = 303) 5-6/2021. The confirmatory factor analysis and follow up correlational analysis demonstrated the support for the dimensions of Epistemic and Ontological Cognition Questionnaire (Greene et al, 2010), for the dimension on Value of Integration information (Wiley et al., 2020), and for the dimension focusing on Historical Methodology in generating historical knowledge (Stoel et al., 2017). The student reading comprehension was correlated to epistemic belief dimensions related to epistemic criteria of justification by multiple sources. The potential practical and research uses of the investigated self-report questionnaires in regular history classroom instructions were discussed.

‘Burning toda la mierda’: a schizo-affective poem

ABSTRACT We gave ourselves permission to affect and to be affected. We listened to the voices of Chilean child welfare workers and embodied their experiences. We heard their doubts, contradictions, ideas, and yearnings. After a series of interviews, we created three poems with those voices. It felt wrong and incomplete. Vertical(ly)-Dry. We focused on the textual, but the workers’ voices demanded an Ontological change, an analysis from Affect theory that looked for the resonance of their experiences in us, with them. An Epistemological change was also needed. One that claimed there are other ways to create knowledge. In this case, we did it through poetry and by defying the anglophone academic vehicular language, presenting some nuances of English and Spanish. Finally, in the hope to contribute to the current Affect Studies, we present our Methodology, which has the shape of a schizo-affective poem called (and calling to) ‘Burning toda la mierda’.

Multimodal Transduction and Translanguaging in Deaf Pedagogy

Multimodal transduction is an interaction of teaching and learning. It traverses changes in epistemology and ontology through judgements about axiology. Using multimodal transduction (MT), students and teachers transcend languages and employ nonlanguage and quasi-language modes (e.g., drawing, color, line, math, infographics, and even sculptures). This study uses qualitative empirical data via grounded theory and case study designs to make theoretical claims about MT in a deaf higher-educational context. The data for this multi-year project were sourced through interviews, document analysis, observations, and stimulated recall with six university professors who are deaf. My analysis shows that these deaf faculty-members employ MT to convert inaccessible modes to become accessible for deaf learners. By changing modalities through MT, deaf faculty enhance comprehensibility and equity for deaf learners. This theoretical account of MT contends, extends, and clarifies aspects of translanguaging theory. As I argue, both operations transform power relations in the classroom by addressing ethics through deaf-centric aesthetics. In deaf education, MT is equally important for faculty in teaching and students’ learning. MT is widely and creatively used, owing to its flexibility and adaptivity. MT is useful for all deaf agents, regardless of additional disabilities, language competencies, or language deprivation. The MT process is inexplicit and undertheorized in the literature about deaf pedagogy and in translanguaging research. My study provides empirical support for theoretical claims about underlying mechanisms of translanguaging. One focus is to explore how MT and translanguaging (and similar theories) align or diverge. I argue that MT is a core mechanism that supports changes between all modes of discourse that enable information exchange, including but surpassing languages and translanguaging. In sum, MT is an interaction whereby deaf agents change the forms of knowledge; meanwhile, new realities and new power relations are manifested.

Eye for an AI: More-than-seeing, fauxtomation, and the enactment of uncertain data in digital pathology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are being developed to assist with increasingly complex diagnostic tasks in medicine. This produces epistemic disruption in diagnostic processes, even in the absence of AI itself, through the datafication and digitalization encouraged by the promissory discourses around AI. In this study of the digitization of an academic pathology department, we mobilize Barad's agential realist framework to examine these epistemic disruptions. Narratives and expectations around AI-assisted diagnostics-which are inextricable from material changes-enact specific types of organizational change, and produce epistemic objects that facilitate to the emergence of some epistemic practices and subjects, but hinder others. Agential realism allows us to simultaneously study epistemic, ethical, and ontological changes enacted through digitization efforts, while keeping a close eye on the attendant organizational changes. Based on ethnographic analysis of pathologists' changing work processes, we identify three different types of uncertainty produced by digitization: sensorial, intra-active, and fauxtomated uncertainty. Sensorial and intra-active uncertainty stem from the ontological otherness of digital objects, materialized in their affordances, and result in digital slides' partial illegibility. Fauxtomated uncertainty stems from the quasi-automated digital slide-making, which complicates the question of responsibility for epistemic objects and related knowledge by marginalizing the human.

Physiological and biochemical responses of Limonium tetragonum to NaCl concentrations in hydroponic solution.

Limonium (L.) tetragonum (Thunb.) A. A. Bullock, a halophyte that grows all over the southwest coast of Korea, is a medicinal plant with various pharmacological effects. The salt defense mechanism stimulates the biosynthesis of various secondary metabolites and improves functional substances. In this study, we investigated the optimal NaCl concentration for the growth and enhancement of secondary metabolites in hydroponically grown L. tetragonum. The seedlings grown for 3 weeks in a hydroponic cultivation system were treated with 0-, 25-, 50-, 75-, and 100-mM NaCl in Hoagland's nutrient solution for 8 weeks. No significant effect on the growth and chlorophyll fluorescence was observed for the NaCl concentrations below 100-mM. The increase in the NaCl concentration resulted in the decrease in the water potential of the L. tetragonum leaves. The Na+ content accumulated in the aerial part increased rapidly and the content of K+, which acts as an antagonist, decreased with the increase in NaCl concentrations in hydroponics. The total amino acid content of L. tetragonum decreased compared to the 0-mM NaCl, and most of the amino acid content decreased as the NaCl concentration increased. In contrast, the content of urea, proline (Pro), β-alanine, ornithine, and arginine was increased with an increase in NaCl concentration. The Pro content at 100-mM NaCl accounted for 60% of the total amino acids and was found to be a major osmoregulator as an important component of the salt defense mechanisms. The top five compounds identified in the L. tetragonum were classified as flavonoids while the flavanone compound was detected only in the NaCl treatments. A total of four myricetin glycosides were increased in comparison to the 0-mM NaCl. Among the differentially expressed genes, a significantly large change in Gene ontology was seen in the circadian rhythm. NaCl treatment enhanced the flavonoid-based substances of L. tetragonum. The optimum NaCl concentration for the enhancement of secondary metabolites of the L. tetragonum in the vertical farm-hydroponic cultivation system was 75-mM NaCl.

Methods of managing the evolution of ontologies and their alignments

Nowadays, none can expect that knowledge about some part of reality will not change. Consequently, a representation of such evolving knowledge (for example, ontologies) also changes. Such changes entail that applications incorporating such knowledge may become compromised and yield wrong results. An example of such an application is ontology alignment which can be informally described as a set of connections between two ontologies. Those connections mark elements from two ontologies that relate to the same parts of reality. In changing one of the corresponding ontologies, such connections may become invalid. One may designate the ontology alignment once again from scratch for altered ontologies. However, such an approach is time and resource-consuming. The paper comprehensively presents our ontology evolution and alignment maintenance framework. It can be used to preserve the validity of ontology alignment using only the analysis of changes introduced to maintained ontologies. The precise definition of ontologies is provided, along with a definition of the ontology change log. A set of algorithms that allow revalidating ontology alignments have been built based on such elements.

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

“Asia as method” as a quest of the spirit and finding we-togetherness: a collaborative autoethnography

This paper responds to the special issue’s call for educators to examine the epistemological and ontological changes that happen to themselves after long-term working abroad and how this experience helps challenge theoretical and pedagogical norms in education. Employing collaborative autoethnography as our research method, we use our life stories of growing up in Asia and studying and working in the West to reflect on our journey of becoming scholars comfortable in engaging Chinese wisdom traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—in Western academia. We share how our experiences of encouraging Asian spiritual traditions and engaging in contemplative practices led us to embrace the ontology and epistemology of Eastern wisdom traditions, and come to understand Eastern philosophies as living wisdom, as a way of being and knowing. We further detail how comprehending Eastern philosophies at a heart-mind level has transformed our views on humanity, allowing us to see the common struggles of peoples in the East and West, Asia and North America. Our ontological and epistemological transformations brought about by Eastern contemplative practices have enabled us to see that there is not such a thing as “Asia” or “North America. ” Rather, we interare and we are Earth citizens. We end our inquiry by advocating for the need to engage spirit as method and conduct research and teaching with a heightened sense of we-togetherness, from a heart and mind that is open and boundless, for the benefits of all our relations—visible and invisible, human and more than human.

A Multi-Attention Approach Using BERT and Stacked Bidirectional LSTM for Improved Dialogue State Tracking

The modern digital world and associated innovative and state-of-the-art applications that characterize its presence, render the current digital age a captivating era for many worldwide. These innovations include dialogue systems, such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana, that stay on the personal devices of users and assist them in their daily activities. These systems track the intentions of users by analyzing their speech, context by looking at their previous turns, and several other external details, and respond or act in the form of speech output. For these systems to work efficiently, a dialogue state tracking (DST) module is required to infer the current state of the dialogue in a conversation by processing previous states up to the current state. However, developing a DST module that tracks and exploit dialogue states effectively and accurately is challenging. The notable challenges that warrant immediate attention include scalability, handling the unseen slot-value pairs during training, and retraining the model with changes in the domain ontology. In this article, we present a new end-to-end framework by combining BERT, Stacked Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), and a multiple attention mechanism to formalize DST as a classification problem and address the aforementioned issues. The BERT-based module encodes the user’s and system’s utterances. The Stacked BiLSTM extracts the contextual features and multiple attention mechanisms to calculate the attention between its hidden states and the utterance embeddings. We experimentally evaluated our method against the current approaches over a variety of datasets. The results indicate a significant overall improvement. The proposed model is scalable in terms of sharing the parameters and it considers the unseen instances during training.

Layered immunity and layered leukemogenicity: Developmentally restricted mechanisms of pediatric leukemia initiation.

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and multipotent progenitor cells (MPPs) arise in successive waves during ontogeny, and their properties change significantly throughout life. Ontological changes in HSCs/MPPs underlie corresponding changes in mechanisms of pediatric leukemia initiation. As HSCs and MPPs progress from fetal to neonatal, juvenile and adult stages of life, they undergo transcriptional and epigenetic reprogramming that modifies immune output to meet age-specific pathogenic challenges. Some immune cells arise exclusively from fetal HSCs/MPPs. We propose that this layered immunity instructs cell fates that underlie a parallel layered leukemogenicity. Indeed, some pediatric leukemias, such as juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia, myeloid leukemia of Down syndrome, and infant pre-B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, are age-restricted. They only present during infancy or early childhood. These leukemias likely arise from fetal progenitors that lose competence for transformation as they age. Other childhood leukemias, such as non-infant pre-B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia, have mutation profiles that are common in childhood but rare in morphologically similar adult leukemias. These differences could reflect temporal changes in mechanisms of mutagenesis or changes in how progenitors respond to a given mutation at different ages. Interactions between leukemogenic mutations and normal developmental switches offer potential targets for therapy.

Transhumanism, Motion, and Human Perfection

Abstract Transhumanism’s ideology is marked by a commitment to the “progress” or “perfection” of the human species through technological means. What transhumanists are after is not just therapeutic intervention or optimization of current human capabilities, but an ontological change from human to posthuman. In this article, I critique transhumanist ideology on the grounds that it fundamentally misunderstands human moral perfection as resulting from forces acting upon us (i.e., technological interventions), rather than an internal change of character. This misunderstanding reflects an impoverished view of the concept of motion brought about by the rise of modern science, which entails certain ontological commitments that are not Christian in nature. I conclude transhumanism is untenable because it rests on a shaky foundation of Newtonian physics, and reduces the world to mere matter and forces. Furthermore, Christian transhumanism is especially flawed, because it is complicit in this severing of creation from its sacramental ontology, from the Being of God.

Urbanization-environment conundrum: an invitation to sustainable development in Saudi Arabian cities

ABSTRACT As rapid urbanization becomes a key topic within urban studies and planning particularly in the Global South, it needs to be considered what radical implications to urban environment mean. Reviewing literature on urbanization and its implications on urban environment from within the Global South and on sustainable development research and environmental studies, this article discusses eight implications of urbanization-environmental conundrum: pollution, water resource degradation, urban heat island effect, sea level rise and urban flooding, urban sprawl and slum growth, urban agriculture decline, public health deterioration, and urban wetland destruction that question the ontology of urbanization in Global South cities. Drawing on cases from Saudi Arabian cities, findings indicate that sustainable development agenda is skewed towards socio-economic development with limited focus on environmental issues. This situation is threatening the sustainability of rapidly urbanizing cities. The paper proposes a rhizomatic understanding of environmental importance as a roadmap for sustainable and transformative urbanization in Global South. This ontology changes understandings of what sustainable urbanization should be in rapidly growing Global South cities.

International Whaling Commission as a Natural Resource Management Regime

Abstract Whaling as governed by the International Whaling Commission (iwc) is a global regime of natural resource management, which has experienced significant changes over time. Currently, the iwc regime constitutes a legal framework aiming at protection of both whales and the interests of traditional indigenous whaling populations. The aim of this paper is to examine how the international management of the whale resource has evolved, what kind of an indigenous market it is today and where it might be heading. Although the iwc as a whaling organisation is today geared essentially towards facilitating indigenous whaling, the regime is not indigenous in substance. It is not even a collaborative system. In essence, indigenous whaling within the iwc remains a colonial regime where indigenous interests are subordinate to nation states and Western science. The fundamental ontological mismatch of traditional indigenous conceptions of the world and those on which the iwc is based makes it difficult to introduce changes. Development of participatory rights of indigenous whaling communities within the iwc regime could constitute a procedural first step with potential to contribute to improving also the substantive rights of indigenous whalers. Relational values approach could help to achieve more pivotal ontological change of mindsets to allow indigenous people to gain real agency and organise their relationship with whales in accordance with their worldviews.